Spent a significant proportion of today playing TimeSplitters 2, primarily to unlock a bunch of stuff ahead of people coming over to play games in a couple of weeks, but also just because I fancied it. And because it appears that when I start playing TimeSplitters 2, it is suddenly 2.30am before I have noticed what has happened.

I was concentrating on the "Arcade League" and "Challenge" modes today, since that's where a lot of stuff gets unlocked — most notably game modes. These are also the quickest and most addictive parts of the game — they always push you just that little bit further in order to try and get the gold rankings, or indeed just finish the damn missions at all.

I'd forgotten how brutal Challenge mode was, but I did remember some of the Arcade League matches that gave me trouble last time around. Anything involving Duckman Drake is always infuriating but inevitably a matter of pride to beat in a satisfactory manner, while my attempts to clear the "Handyman" one up until a few moments ago brought back some fond memories of swearing at the TV back in university. There was also plenty of swearing at the TV this evening.

I think I'm satisfied with what I've managed to unlock today; I did want to unlock Handyman as a playable character, because I remember him being quite popular with my friends, but I don't know if I'm up to clearing that particular Arcade League mission — it's super hard.

Anyway, I had a thoroughly fabulous time with it, and despite the fact that it has previously appeared on the short;Play series, I suspect TimeSplitters 2 will be putting in an appearance on Retro Select at some point — perhaps sooner rather than later, since I haven't yet decided what I'm going to be recording tomorrow!

Anyway, what with it being 2.30am and all I should probably get some sleep. Hope you're all having a pleasant weekend!

Finished off Atelier Sophie this evening. It looks like there's a fair amount of postgame to explore, but I haven't decided if I'm going to delve into that too much — I feel like I'm lagging behind a bit where I want to be on the Atelier MegaFeature as a whole, and so I'm keen to move on to Atelier Firis. Atelier Firis is also one of the games I've been most curious about, so I'm looking forward to that one in general.

I looked up a walkthrough just to figure out how much I had left to do in Atelier Sophie, and found myself thinking that the way I'd played the game sounded much more fun than just following this rather unnecessarily detailed guide. I have no doubt that some people would have probably played through the whole game with that guide by their side the whole time, but one of my greatest pleasures with Atelier Sophie as a whole is how "organic" it all felt — and the lack of time limit allows you to truly enjoy that aspect of the game.

If you play the game to work through a checklist of things to do before you get a Platinum trophy, you're kind of playing it wrong. It's a game about enjoying the world, about enjoying hanging out with the characters and about experimenting with the mechanics. Were I not writing about the series as a whole, I'd be spending a lot more time in the company of Sophie and company after those end credits rolled — it really is a very likeable cast, and the mechanics have enough intriguing complexity about them to reward continued exploration.

But I'm happy with what I achieved. I put myself in a good position for the game's final encounters, and took down some of the optional bosses on the way to the finale. I didn't make all the available items, but I made a decent number of them — and spending a bit of time in the postgame would doubtless let me nail the others pretty easily. And all without looking at a guide once.

GameFAQs is a wonderful thing and an amazing resource that I'm astonished still exists in its mostly original form after Gamespot took it over. But the more I play and appreciate games as I get older, the more I enjoy exploring them for myself, rather than following a step-by-step guide that offers just one possible way to play — and, in the case of games like this, that is far from the only way to play.

Anyway. Journeys continue! Getting closer and closer to the end… just as I start to hear some rumblings that a new Atelier might be on the way at some point. I mean, obviously it's Ryza 3, we all knew that — it's just a matter of whether that arrives before or after I've finished the feature in its original form!

Kiryu Coco, one of the many VTubers in the Hololive agency, "graduated" today, which, for the benefit of those of you who follow me more for retro gaming stuff than Japanese popular culture stuff, means she's stepped down from her role and said her final farewells, both to her audience and her peers.

I didn't watch a lot of Coco's stuff during her time while she was active — since her streams were primarily subtitled Japanese with occasional English, they required concentration rather than being something you could put on in the background.

But her influence could be felt absolutely everywhere in the VTuber community. She was a trendsetter, an inspiration, someone who knew how to push the boundaries — and someone who wasn't afraid to make mistakes.

She was one of the first to recognise that there was a significant overseas audience for VTuber videos, so she catered to that audience by occasionally speaking English and providing subtitles for many of her streams.

And she was the one who pushed for Hololive to expand into English-speaking territories, and thus she played a significant role in the explosion in popularity of VTubing as both a hobby and a profession for what is likely thousands of people worldwide at this point.

I watched her entire graduation stream earlier. She had the foresight to pre-record a number of interviews with other generations of Hololive and subtitle these in advance, so she was thinking of her overseas viewers right until the end — a nice touch. The last part of her stream consisted of her performing several songs with her "genmates" from the fourth generation of Hololive talent, and it was emotional to watch — particularly seeing her comrade Towa clearly breaking down in tears partway through the performance.

When she stepped off the virtual stage for the last time at the end of her performance, the silence was deafening, and the tears flowed. The room was filled with that sort of heaviness only felt when something wonderful that you'd come to take for granted is suddenly gone, and you don't know quite how to process the situation. The same feeling you feel when a family member or beloved pet passes on, or a precious relationship comes to an end; nothing quite feels real.

The performer behind Coco isn't gone — and the Internet being the Internet, she was tracked down pretty quickly and shown a massive influx of support from Coco's fans — but it's still hard not to feel that something, someone, important died today.

To those not immersed in VTuber culture this might all sound rather strange, silly or confusing. I'd call myself a relatively casual fan of VTubers at best — I don't watch many streams live and I don't throw money at these girls nightly like some people do — but I understood the significance of what happened today, and the genuine emotion that people felt as Kiryu Coco passed from being a legend in her own lifetime into simply being a legend.

The world moves on far too fast for all of us, though. It's hard to believe that Coco had become such a beloved presence in so many people's lives in just a year and a half. Granted, she had helped people through one of the most difficult 18-month periods in recent history, but even so, it's still strange to think of her being here for such a relatively brief period of time, and then gone again.

But life moves on, whether we like it or not, and people heal. Kiryu Coco will not be forgotten, and nor will the good she did for this world.

I wish the performer behind the world's favourite shitposting dragon all the love, success and happiness in the world with whatever she ends up doing next. She created something wonderful — and I'm sure she can do it again.

I've been pretty much immune to impulse purchasing on Steam sales for the last few times they've rolled around. A significant part of this is down to my focus on physical collecting, but I also feel like the Steam sales these days really highlight the big problem with digital platforms in general: curation (or the lack thereof) and discovery.

It used to be that interesting things in the Steam sale spread virally, and before long everyone owned a copy. It's how stuff like Recettear came to be so legendary; somehow I suspect if that game were released today, it would disappear without trace, however good it is.

Part of this was down to the fact that the store was simply less crowded, and thus things that stood out in some way — the aforementioned Recettear was, I believe, the first localised Japanese doujin title to hit the platform, for example — were easier to stumble across, simply by virtue of the fact that they looked different and intriguing.

Nowadays, however, the front page of Steam is cluttered with the biggest triple-A releases that don't have particularly generous discounts on them and, in the case of the platform's "personal recommendations" feature, games that I already own on other platforms. I guess there's something to be said for the fact that Steam's algorithms correctly understand my tastes, but it wouldn't hurt for it to maybe recommend something a little off the beaten track. Something as simple as an "I already own this elsewhere" button would be helpful — I actually don't know if that's already a thing, because it certainly isn't obvious if it is.

Anyway, the main issue I find is that I'm presented with the front page of the sale and I have no idea where to go from there. The genre labels are misapplied, meaning that stuff like "adventure" includes both third-person action games and actual adventure games, to name just one annoying example. Navigation within those categories is a clumsy nightmare. And the whole thing seems to be wrapped in some sort of stupid metagame that makes it all way more confusing to navigate than it needs to be.

Steam, like many other platforms — be they digital downloads or social media — has become less and less appealing the more features they've added. The trading card and achievement features have encouraged developers to put out low-effort crap — and for people to buy it "just for the cards". The "badges" system for user reviews encourages people to write "funny" (and I use the term loosely) reviews rather than anything helpful and meaningful — or to mock reviews that do take things a bit more seriously.

The one thing I do like is the Points Shop, which allows you to customise your profile with graphics and stuff from your favourite games, but even that is flawed — navigating the catalogue is a roll of the dice at best if you're looking for something specific, and who looks at anyone else's Steam profiles anyway?

Ah well. I should be grateful that my wallet is safe from Gaben's temptations… although my lack of spending in Steam sales does tend to mean that I spend more on limited-run editions of Switch games… so I'm not sure I'm really winning anything, after all! At least my shelves are well-stocked!

I went to the gym this evening, and I'm torn between feeling pleased with myself that I got off my arse and did something vaguely good for me, and feeling demoralised at what a terrible state my body is in.

It was already in a terrible state before the pandemic hit, but it's a real mess now; I could barely manage a minute on the cross-fit things, the exercise bike was more manageable but left me drenched in sweat after what normal people would probably call "mild effort", and all the resistance training machines were hard work and, at times, mildly painful.

I think most of my frustration comes from the fact that I know I used to be in a better condition than this. I was never in great condition, no, but I was in much better condition than this. So part of me, while I was at the gym, was wondering if it was all worth it if it's this easy to let everything go to pot. While the more rational side of my brain was telling me that taking things very slowly, one step of a time, will allow me to approach and perhaps exceed how I was before.

I'm feeling demoralised because I know I need to lose weight — it's not I want to lose weight, it's I need to lose weight. But I am prone to self-sabotage and a vicious cycle that I have, to date, found it largely impossible to break free of.

Here's how it goes. I am very overweight. I have a hernia that is exceedingly painful if the slightest pressure is applied to it, or sometimes if the day has an "A" in it. I cannot get the hernia fixed unless I lose weight. I make a plan to lose weight. I attempt to follow through on it. The pain of my hernia makes me miserable. I eat as a coping mechanism to deal with being depressed. 20 GOTO 10

"Just stop eating as a coping mechanism" is obviously the clear solution, or at the very least "eat better things as a coping mechanism". But as anyone who has had any sort of contact with mental health will know, it's not that simple. Sometimes your body and mind craves things, and will not feel satisfied until it is supplied with those things that it craves. And substitutes don't work; I'm never going to fend off a chocolate craving with the disgustingness that is a chia seed pudding with cocoa in it.

It is, as the diet experts say, about making better choices. The trouble with mental health is that your brain isn't always in the best position to make sensible choices, and thus mistakes are often made.

Still, as other hypothetical people say, recognising a problem is the first step in dealing with it, so I guess it's just a case of taking things a step at a time and seeing if I can make myself feel a little bit better and more positive about myself, bit by bit. It's not easy. Some days it feels impossible. But I can only try.

Something occurred to me earlier today while I was reading IGN's Debbie Downer review of Mario Golf, which whinged about it not having any "replay value". Something didn't seem quite right about that as a concept, so I pondered exactly what the thought that was forming in my head was. And I think I've got it.

A lot of people seem to have lost the concept of playing something simply for the pure enjoyment of playing it. By that I mean it's sometimes quite tough to convince people to play something if they don't feel like they're going to "get something" out of it. And I don't mean something intangible like "a sense of satisfaction" or "the knowledge that they've done something that they enjoyed" — I mean literally being rewarded for doing something that should already, in itself, be its own reward.

Mario Golf does a good job of rewarding your progress through its Golf Adventure mode with level ups, money, the opportunity to buy new equipment and new courses to challenge. But once you've unlocked everything, the game is just… there. And, contrary to what the IGN review seemed to argue, this isn't a bad thing.

Sometimes it's really nice to boot up a game and know that it has no expectations for you beyond simply engaging with its mechanics and having fun. It doesn't expect you to "beat it", it doesn't place unreasonably long lists of objectives in front of you, it doesn't feature "retention strategies". It just is. It's a game that is there, comfortable in the knowledge that you'll pick it up, play it for a bit and then perhaps put it down for a while, only to return to it two, four, six months later when you fancy a quick round of golf or whatever it happens to offer.

That sort of experience isn't "a lack of replay value". That sort of experience is potentially infinite replay value — particularly when you take multiplayer into consideration. It's the way the oldest video games were designed — and it's one of many reasons that so many of them remain timeless classics to this day, while a lot of today's games feel inherently disposable.

If you ever find yourself thinking that you don't feel like playing a game because it's not showering you with experience points, levels, trophies and achievements on a regular basis… stop and take a step back for a moment. Ponder why you're engaging with this hobby. And remember that sometimes it's okay for things to just be fun and nothing else.

I was dismayed to hear about the passing of "Near" earlier today. I'd never come across this person directly, but most of us who have had an interest in retro gaming have probably come across their work in one form or another; they played an instrumental role in getting SNES emulation in particular to the place where it is today, and had even worked on a true labour of love: a fan translation of Square's Bahamut Lagoon for SNES, which many people are playing in Near's honour this evening.

As a document which has been doing the rounds online notes, Near's passing is likely to be described as "suicide" or "taking their own life", but this isn't accurate. In what is sadly the latest of many cases of people being harassed online until they see no other option but to die, Near was the victim of the notorious website "KiwiFarms", whose community takes great delight in using the inimitable resourcefulness of people who are online all day to track down personal information and do horrible, horrible things with it.

Near was murdered by KiwiFarms. The people of KiwiFarms may not have wielded the physical murder weapon directly, but it is their fault that this happened.

As I say, I didn't know Near, I'm only learning of some of their contributions to the retro gaming community today — but I've certainly benefited from their work at one point or another. And I'm disgusted to see that this has happened. Because I've seen how easily this sort of thing can escalate… multiple times.

We've seen it happen to people in the public eye. Game developer Alec Holowka took his own life after online harassment and abuse about accusations that may or may not have been true. Whether or not they were true doesn't matter; he didn't deserve to die for anything that he'd done. But when the mob comes for you online, they're out for blood. They're only satisfied when their victim of the hour is absolutely, completely destroyed — at the very least in terms of their livelihood and personal life and, seemingly, preferably snuffing out their actual life in the process.

We saw it with YouTuber ProJared. People were alarmingly quick to jump on the bandwagon to harass him off the Internet when there was the slightest whiff of wrongdoing — so much so that his long silence while all this was going on caused me to be seriously concerned that he was going to be yet another statistic. Thankfully, he had the strength and resourcefulness of his own to be able to not only bounce back but counterattack, and today he's in a stronger position than ever.

We even saw it with Dan from Game Grumps, who is one of the most lovely people imaginable — though in this case the whole situation was a rather half-assed attempt rather blatantly fabricated by an anti-Game Grumps subreddit. Dan's method of dealing with it was admirable — just don't pay any attention to social media whatsoever. One gets the impression he was mostly oblivious to the entire thing — which is doubtless the best defence against all of this sort of shit.

But it doesn't just happen to people in the public eye. As I've mentioned a couple of times on here before, I've been a victim of this, too. A group of trolls took an interest in me a few years back and decided to not only try and drag my name through the mud, but also trawl through everything online vaguely connected to me in order to try and destroy me.

They phoned my parents, my brother, the person who owned the website I was running at the time. They contacted people on Facebook, they made webpages about me, they did everything they could to destroy me. And I won't lie, they almost succeeded; when I went to the police with an armful of evidence of what these assholes were doing to me and I was told in pretty certain terms that there was very little they could do, I nearly lost all hope.

It blew over eventually. When I stopped responding, they left me alone — and the people close to me are all good enough people to recognise that I most certainly was not what my abusers were making me out to be. And so given time, everything went back to normal. But it was scary for a time. Seriously scary. I guess I am fortunate enough that I am a relative "nobody" online in comparison to some others; there were always going to be "higher value" targets than me.

But this shouldn't be "normal". This shouldn't be something we should just accept as part of life online.

I remember when the Internet first started becoming "mainstream", and my whole family were excited by the possibilities that this brave new online frontier offered. It was a world of wonder and discovery back then — and I doubt any of us could have ever anticipated that there would be active communities of people out there whose sole "hobby" was destroying other human beings' lives, both figuratively and literally.

Sadly, I feel we're in a bit of a Pandora's Box situation. The Internet as a whole, despite local regulations, has been such an untamed wildland for so long that there's no real way that communities like KiwiFarms can ever be truly brought under control. And thus this situation will just continue if we allow it to happen.

I wish I had a suggestion or two to help us all keep safe… beyond simple "common sense" suggestions, of course. Because "common sense" doesn't seem to be enough; when I was attacked, I certainly wasn't making a point of voluntarily spreading personal information around the Internet — and yet they still got to not only me but the people closest to me, too.

Sadly, the safest option appears to simply "don't be online", which becomes a more appealing prospect day after day — while also being pretty much completely impossible for living in today's world.

Keep safe, everyone.

Mario Golf arrived today! So only a day late — I was also podcasting for the first part of the day, so it didn't even matter that it didn't show up until mid-afternoon.

I've spent a few hours with it this evening and I'm enjoying it a lot. I particularly like how it's deliberately not trying to just do the same thing as it has done in the past — notably, it's tweaked the control scheme quite a bit from the classic "three-tap" system that previous entries in the series have used, and the new "speed golf" mechanics are super cool.

I'll talk more about the details of all this on Rice next week when I write something more in-depth, but for now, the main difference in the controls is that there's no "accuracy" tap when you're taking your swing. Instead, there are now a couple of factors in play. Once you've pressed the button once and again a second time to set power (optionally choosing to add topspin or backspin at this point depending on which button you use) the meter takes a second "swing", and during that time you can use the analogue stick to "curve" your shot.

Nothing unusual there… until you discover that golfers with better "spin" stats can actually curve their shots multiple times in different directions, allowing you to, say, curve the ball around a tree that's in the way and then bend it back in the opposite direction to get it back on course. Realistic? Probably not, but it's an interesting mechanic that works well with Mario Golf's cartoony, arcadey gameplay.

The other thing I've found interesting is the number of variations on golf that the game's "Adventure" mode provides you with. On the first course, you play pretty straightforward golf, but by the time you get to the second one you're challenged to play "cross-country golf", which tasks you with sinking the ball on a set number of holes within a limited total number of shots. And just to be awkward, this course has enormous changes in elevation with cliffs and valleys, requiring you to make use of "tornadoes" to move both you and your ball to different "levels" of the course. It's a really clever and creative use of the golf mechanics to create quite a different feeling game experience.

The third course that I've just got you challenges you to full-on Speed Golf, where you are ranked more on how quickly you got to the hole (and your number of putts) than actually how many shots you took. And there are still some other variations I'm yet to discover; "Battle Golf" sounds particularly interesting, and is teased in the game's intro sequence. (You can also play it as a one-off game right away, but I've been ploughing through Adventure mode, as it seems you unlock a bunch of stuff through that.)

Anyway, early impressions are very good, and I'll doubtless spend some more time with it in the next few days. Watch out for a full write-up on Rice Digital very soon!

Amazon failed to deliver my copy of Mario Golf today for… some reason. "Delayed in transit", apparently, which is just non-specific enough to be completely useless information, but just specific enough to mean I can't get mad with them about it. Oh well.

Hopefully it will arrive tomorrow as I was looking forward to giving that a go this evening and over the weekend. It's been too long since I had a Mario Golf game to enjoy, and I'm looking forward to both playing the standard game modes in this one and the new stuff it has to offer. If The Davison Cup actually comes to fruition next month — which it's looking like it should — then perhaps we can get a round or two of Speed Golf in there amid the other stuff I have planned.

My packaged copy of Crawlco Block Knockers arrived today. That's a thoroughly lovely game, and the packaging from Funbox is really nice once again. It's a simple package, consisting of simply a cardboard slipcase containing the Switch game and a soundtrack CD, but it's got nice quality artwork and gives that game the love it deserves — it really is a ton of fun.

Podcast planned for tomorrow. As noted previously, we're trying something slightly different to usual for this one so this will be something of an experimental episode. If all goes well, though, it should hopefully allow us to get together a bit more often and do mroe fun things. Assuming things go to plan, said new episode should be with you on the Monday after we record as usual, but I'll keep you posted on that.

For now, it's been a very long week so I think it's time to get some sleep and enjoy a much-needed and much-deserved lie in tomorrow morning. Hope you've all had a good week — enjoy your weekends and make sure you take some time to enjoy yourselves!

I've been meaning to set up a proper DOSBox… setup for a while now, but I got round to it over the past couple of days. And somehow, simply doing that fresh install of DOSBox has fixed one of the main issues I have with a lot of GOG's DOSBox-based releases: pixel scaling.

For some reason, a lot of GOG's DOSBox titles don't scale elegantly to high resolutions, meaning you end up with horrible wonky pixels all over the place that don't do that lovely 320×200 or 640×480 art justice. I can't find what setting they've buggered up in their config files, but whatever the default setup for a fresh install of DOSBox is seems to fix it completely. So what I might start doing with my GOG games is just copying the files over into my "proper" DOSBox installation and use them from there instead. Job solved.

The reason I wanted to get this sorted was because as part of the Retro Select series, I want to cover some DOS games. There are a bunch I have very fond memories of — and a bunch I still have on my shelf, as you've doubtless seen in the background of my video introductions — so it will be nice to be able to bust them out and make use of them properly.

I was skeptical as to whether or not I could get original media to successfully install an old, boxed DOS PC game into DOSBox, but I tried it with Psygnosis' Pyrotechnica — a fun game that no-one remembers, and thus a prime candidate for a video — and it worked perfectly. And despite that game's rather stern warnings about probably requiring a boot disk to work properly, no faffing around with memory managers or Sound Blaster settings required. Living the DOS dream, for sure.

I was also excited to get Cobra Mission working without any issues whatsoever; I've been curious about that game ever since it was announced and I very much enjoyed my relatively brief exploration of it for this week's History of Lewd over on Rice Digital — I may well play a bit more, because I found it to be a genuinely interesting game.

Anyway, that's probably the most exciting thing that has happened today. Mario Golf should be coming tomorrow, so hopefully I'll have some time to play around with that, and then Chris and I are recording a podcast on Saturday.

Half-considering taking a week's break from writing a chunk of the Atelier MegaFeature this weekend as although I'm making good progress on Sophie and am in a position to write the next part I have planned, I'm also kinda tired. I'll make a decision on that over the weekend depending on how everything else goes.

Anyway. Time for an early night, I think; neither Andie nor I have been sleeping well of late, so here's hoping for a pleasant night's sleep for once.